


Valley Fold, Mountain Fold

by artisticalgorithm, tookumade



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Embedded Images, Gen, Graduation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2017-05-28
Packaged: 2018-11-05 22:59:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11023383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artisticalgorithm/pseuds/artisticalgorithm, https://archiveofourown.org/users/tookumade/pseuds/tookumade
Summary: It started during a study session early in their third year, with Oikawa absently folding an origami lily out of notebook paper he had torn into a square.





	Valley Fold, Mountain Fold

**Author's Note:**

> An art/fic collab done for the [HQ!! Flower Zine](http://twitter.com/hqflowerzine)!
> 
> Art is done by Elisabeth/[artisticalgorithm](http://archiveofourown.org/users/artisticalgorithm/); fic is written by San/[tookumade](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tookumade/works), with many thanks to Elisabeth for her beta-ing and notes!

It started during a study session early in their third year, with Oikawa absently folding an origami lily out of notebook paper he had torn into a square.  
  
Iwaizumi, Matsukawa, and Hanamaki all stopped what they were doing. It was a sign of how sick of studying they were, that even Iwaizumi didn’t try to stop him. They watched as he folded the paper over and over with neat, crisp lines, until he finished by pulling the lily’s petals open and curling them with a pen. He twirled the flower between his fingers, satisfied, before dropping it onto the table, and turning back to his work. His friends, too, as though snapping out of a daze, returned to their studying.  
  
Oikawa folded another lily, two days later; this time, Hanamaki joined in. His flower was little hurried and rough, but that suited him, in a way.  
  
The next time, Matsukawa folded one too—slow, neat, meticulous.  
  
“Why do you guys get distracted so easily?” asked Iwaizumi, turning his textbook page. “I’m never going to hear the end of it if you fail something.”  
  
“As if we’ll fail because of origami!” said Hanamaki, throwing his flower at him. “Anyway, don’t you want to join in? It’s relaxing.”  
  
“No.”  
  
“I don’t think Iwa-chan knows _how_ ,” said Oikawa, raising his eyebrows. “I’ve never seen you fold anything other than cranes…”  
  
“It’s not a big deal—” But in one movement, Hanamaki and Matsukawa grabbed Iwaizumi’s books and yanked them aside. Oikawa slapped a piece of square notebook paper in front of him.  
  
“No more homework until you fold a flower, Iwa-chan!” he said, grinning. “Think of this as a team building exercise.”  
  
“I’ll make kicking all your asses a team building exer—”  
  
“Enough with the empty threats, you gorilla,” said Hanamaki. “Fold it in half diagonally, go!”  
  
“I’ll do the practical demonstration; you two can yell at him,” said Matsukawa, pulling out another piece of paper.  
  
“ _Guys_ —”  
  
“ _Diagonally_ , Iwa-chan! No, line up these corners _neatly_ —”  
  
“ _Oh my god_.”  
  
After a handful of minutes of folding, more empty threats of violence, lots of scolding, and Matsukawa’s eraser being thrown around, Iwaizumi was holding a slightly lopsided but complete origami lily.  
  
“Not bad,” said Matsukawa. Hanamaki nodded.  
  
“Now you just gotta practice. No slacking off!” said Oikawa.  
  
Iwaizumi rolled his eyes, but the way he looked at the flower in his hand was more than enough for them to know that he didn’t mean it.

 

 

 

* * *

  
  
Folding lilies became a regular occurrence during their study sessions whenever they wanted a break—regular enough that they began using proper origami paper rather than tearing up their notebooks. This began with Hanamaki dropping a pack of plain coloured paper onto Matsukawa’s chemistry textbook and saying, “Hundred-yen store. Go nuts.”  
  
A few weeks after that, Iwaizumi arrived at the table and pulled out his study materials, along with an extra pen case. He unzipped it and upended it; a dozen origami lilies, neat but unopened, spilled out. Oikawa gave a quiet, delighted squawk.  
  
“I’ve been practising,” said Iwaizumi dryly. “My mother somehow knows it’s your fault. She’s offloaded a stack of paper onto me. They’re here somewhere…” He searched his bag.  
  
“Bless Hajime-kun,” said Hanamaki as they watched Oikawa carefully pull open the lilies. “He’s growing up.”  
  
“Don’t make me give you a paper cut,” said Iwaizumi, placing a small plastic bag onto the table; inside was a stack of colourful paper with various two-colour gradients. Gleefully, Hanamaki and Oikawa helped themselves, but Matsukawa was squinting at the library counter.  
  
“Hey… aren’t those the flowers we folded the last couple of times?” he said, pointing. They all turned to stare.  
  
“They… are,” said Iwaizumi. “I thought one of you guys took them home?”  
  
“Not me,” said Hanamaki and Matsukawa in unison.  
  
“Umm,” said Oikawa sheepishly, and they looked at him. “I thought the library committee might like them, so I left them here on purpose. I guess they _did_ like them enough, if they kept them.”  
  
“Let’s fold more and cover the entire counter,” whispered Hanamaki.  
  
“Race you to the fastest five,” said Matsukawa. And they dove into it.  
  
But after a few minutes, the faculty advisor of the library approached their table.  
  
“You need to stop leaving the flowers here; the library committee tells me we’re running out of room,” she said, voice stern. But when their faces fell, she smiled and added, more warmly, “Sakai-sensei’s pet hamster died last week—she loved it, so she’s been feeling down. Why not leave some flowers at her desk?”  
  
They left two dozen while Sakai-sensei had been out of the staff room. Oikawa later happily reported that she had been a little cheerier during their chemistry class.  
  
From that day onwards, it became a project—noticing students and teachers looking down or tired, and then stealthily gifting several origami lilies to them, usually leaving them in their shoe lockers or on their desks.  
  
It wasn’t a total surprise; the four made no secret of folding the lilies when they were together at school, and occasionally, other third years would even join in. But the element of surprising people with them still counted. Granted, it was hard to gauge for sure whether the surprise flowers were a nice touch or a slight nuisance, but given that no one ever told them to stop, and the fact that sometimes they’d receive thank you messages, or sometimes shy “ _thank you_ ”s if they passed the recipients in the corridors… it was encouraging.  
  
They kept going, and eventually, they aimed to leave flowers for _every_ student and teacher at school, regardless of circumstance. That had been Oikawa’s idea, too: “I just really don’t want to leave anyone behind,” he had said.  
  
Months passed. The school had never been more colourful. The surprise gifting of origami flowers spread until they became something that all students did, not just the third years, which was helpful, because end-of-year exam hell descended upon them quickly, and, disappointed, the third years had to stop.  
  
“I feel like we’re leaving behind a sort of legacy, though,” Oikawa said, smiling.  
  
_Legacy_. A word that was heavy for them now, given that graduation day sped towards them even faster than exam hell had. 

 

 

 

* * *

  
  
And sooner than any of them would’ve liked, they were clutching their rolled-up certificates after their graduation ceremony, and were now loitering around the gymnasium-turned-graduation-hall, surrounded by crying classmates and family members.  
  
Oikawa gathered Iwaizumi, Matsukawa, and Hanamaki together.  
  
“The head of the library committee said there was a surprise for us outside the clubroom.”  
  
They followed him over, trying not to look at each other. Hanamaki’s eyes were slightly red with tears; Matsukawa passed him a pocket pack of tissues.  
  
Suddenly, Oikawa stopped and uttered a soft, “ _Oh_.”  
  
There, just outside the entrance of the volleyball clubroom, several colourful balls of flowers made from origami lilies and assembled in the style of kusudama hung from the second level’s railing; as they drew closer, they saw that most of the kusudama were made up of mismatching paper—which most likely meant they were the lilies folded by the third years, gathered together over the year. Accompanying them was a banner, using the same colours as the volleyball club’s banner, and reading a simple _Thank You_.  
  
They stared at it all in breathless silence. Some of the kusudama swayed gently in the breeze.  
  
“I did wonder what they did with the flowers,” said Iwaizumi at last. “I figured most of the recipients threw them out, but they… kept them. They kept enough to make all these.”  
  
Oikawa nudged him. “Aren’t you glad you joined in when we started folding them?”  
  
“Shut up,” said Iwaizumi. But he laughed a little, his eyes welling up. “Yeah.”  
  
“Stop crying, you sap,” said Hanamaki thickly, furiously blinking back tears.  
  
“Can’t take you guys anywhere,” Matsukawa added, sniffling as he passed Hanamaki another tissue pack.  
  
“I’m really glad we did this,” said Oikawa proud sigh, waving at all the kusudama and the banner. “I’ll miss it.”  
  
“Stop it, or we’re all going to cry again,” said Hanamaki. Iwaizumi snickered.  
  
“You’ve been crying enough for all four of us.”  
  
“ _Shut up, you gorilla_.”  
  
“Guys?” said Oikawa. They turned towards him. He smiled. “Thank you for these three years. Thanks for brightening up the school with me.”  
  
“ _Stop_ ,” said Hanamaki, pulling out a tissue. “I can’t take any more of this.”  
  
“Here.” Matsukawa passed him yet another pack.  
  
“ _How many of these do you have?_ ”  
  
“I had a feeling this would happen, so—”  
  
“You expected me to _cry?_ ”  
  
They looked over at Iwaizumi, who had started laughing. After a moment of fighting back his own laughter, Oikawa joined in, followed by Matsukawa and Hanamaki, both laughing through tears.  
  
And with arms across their shoulders, they held onto each other—held onto this moment for a long time.  
  
It was the end of another year, but more colourful and brighter than anyone could remember. The kusudama swayed in the breeze.

 

 


End file.
